Budget 2027: the National Assembly unpicks the text, with class struggle running underneath

According to Le Monde, the National Assembly is preparing to reject, in the coming days, the first part of the 2027 draft budget, a text the paper judges "devenu caduc et incohérent" ("now obsolete and incoherent"). Deputies have reworked it in depth: they have scrapped some taxes and added others. It now falls to the executive to find a way out of the impasse. The detail of the measures kept or dropped does not appear in the dispatch we have, so we will not invent it. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First observation: a budget that is "incoherent" is not a procedural accident, it is a balance of power written in plain sight. Every tax scrapped or created answers the question that really concerns accountants and picket-line strikers alike: who pays, and who collects? When an assembly without a clear majority gets down to it, each camp pulls the blanket towards the incomes it protects, and the text looks like what it is: a patchwork of impossible compromises rather than a plan.

Note the vocabulary: the text would be "caduc", as if a budget grew old on its own, like a yoghurt. It is a small fetishism of parliamentary news: we lend the document a life of its own and forget the people who wrote it, amended it and torpedoed it. A text does not become incoherent; political groups, carrying distinct social interests, make it so.

Second observation, more structural. The Marxist tradition describes the modern state as a committee managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. The heirs of that reading add nuance: the state enjoys a relative autonomy, and Parliament is a battlefield where one can wrest a tax here, a tax allowance there. But the limits are set by a stubborn constraint: capital must keep accumulating. That is why budget debate so quickly revolves around "sérieux" (seriousness), "crédibilité" (credibility) and "confiance" (confidence): so many ways of saying that certain options, those that would cut too deeply into profits, will be judged irresponsible before they are even voted on.

Third observation: the impasse has a cost, and it is not shared equally. If the executive must rebuild a text, the temptation will be to restore what the deputies removed on the capital side, and to offset it with savings on public spending, that is to say services, benefits and jobs. Austerity is the polite name for a transfer: the indirect wage, the one that funds the hospital and the school, serves as the variable of adjustment. We do not yet know which route the government will choose; that is precisely what will need watching.

As for the announced rejection, it settles nothing: it moves the battle into the corridors, where deals are struck without cameras. The real question is not whether the budget will pass, but who, in the end, will have settled the bill.